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Use CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog to surface vulnerabilities that need urgent attention, then use the applicable deadline to organize remediation work. The federal deadlines in CISA’s FY 2025 FISMA evaluation guide—six months for KEVs from 2021 or earlier and two weeks for all others—apply in the federal agency context; they are not automatically legal deadlines for private-sector organizations. For other teams, they can inform an internal target, provided it is clearly treated as organizational policy.
What a KEV listing tells you
CISA describes the KEV catalog as a living catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities that carry significant risk. A listing is therefore an urgent prioritization signal: it indicates known exploitation, not merely a theoretical weakness or a severity score. It does not, by itself, establish that your organization runs an affected product or version. CISA’s KEV catalog should be checked alongside your current inventory and the affected-product details.
When CISA introduced the catalog in its November 3, 2021 overview, it reported 18,358 cybersecurity vulnerabilities identified in 2020, of which 10,342 were classified as critical or high severity. The initial catalog included approximately 200 vulnerabilities from 2017–2020 and 90 from 2021. These are historical figures from that overview, not current catalog totals. CISA’s November 3, 2021 overview also says the goal of BOD 22-01 is to help federal agencies and public and private organizations improve vulnerability management and reduce exposure to cyberattacks.
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How long do federal agencies have to remediate a KEV?
CISA’s FY 2025 Inspector General FISMA Metrics Evaluation Guide summarizes the federal remediation timeframes as six months for “2021 and older KEVs” and two weeks for all others. The guide presents these in the context of federal agency assessment and BOD 22-01, a binding directive for the federal agencies within its scope. The summary is not a universal legal requirement for companies, nonprofits, or other organizations.
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The Cyber Safety Review Board’s Log4j report describes BOD 22-01 as requiring federal agencies to review and update vulnerability-management procedures, remediate each vulnerability listed in the directive, and report status. CISA’s FY 2025 FISMA Metrics Evaluation Guide and the Cyber Safety Review Board’s Log4j report provide the federal assessment and historical context.
If your organization is not subject to BOD 22-01, you may adopt the same timeframes as internal service-level targets or risk-prioritization inputs. Make that distinction explicit in policy and reporting: an internal target can guide work, but it does not make a federal directive applicable to your organization.
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Turn the deadline into a backlog workflow
- Match the catalog entry to your environment. Confirm the CVE, affected product, and affected version against asset records. Investigate scanner findings before treating them as confirmed exposure; a catalog match does not prove that the vulnerable version is present.
- Set the right clock. Check the current KEV entry and, for an agency subject to BOD 22-01, apply the relevant federal deadline category. Otherwise, assign an organization-defined target and label it as policy rather than a federal mandate.
- Assign the system and owners. Connect the finding to a specific asset or service, its business or mission owner, and the technical remediation owner. If ownership or asset identity is unclear, make resolving that uncertainty a tracked task rather than allowing the finding to sit unassigned.
- Sequence work using operational context. Consider exposure, business importance, patch availability, maintenance constraints, and whether a mitigation is needed while a patch is tested. These factors help order work; they are not a CISA-prescribed scoring formula.
- Track remediation and exceptions. Record the proposed action, owner, due date, test and maintenance plan, and evidence of closure. If blocked, document why, the interim risk treatment, the decision owner, and the next review date. An internal exception does not cancel a federal deadline where one applies.
- Refresh the queue. Update it as assets, catalog entries, and findings change. CISA’s FY 2025 guide describes asset discovery every seven days, credentialed vulnerability scanning every 14 days, and vulnerability-detection signatures updated at intervals no greater than 24 hours. Those are federal assessment guidance frequencies, not universal mandates for every organization.
Make the triage record auditable
CISA’s assessment materials connect asset discovery, credentialed scanning, analysis of scan results, prioritization, patch testing, and patch management as parts of flaw remediation. That connection matters: a deadline is useful only if the team can identify what is affected, determine who must act, and show what happened next. The following record fields are a practical way to make those decisions traceable, rather than a quoted CISA checklist:
- CVE and catalog entry, with the date it was checked.
- Affected asset, product/version match, and whether exposure is confirmed or still being validated.
- Business or mission context and relevant exposure information.
- Remediation owner, action, due date, and testing or maintenance plan.
- Closure evidence, or the unresolved blocker, interim treatment, decision owner, and next review date.
CISA’s FY 2025 guide supplies the federal assessment cadence, while its FY 2024 guide also describes scanning and remediation practices. CISA’s FY 2024 FISMA Metrics Evaluation Guide is useful context for that process, but the stated frequencies above are attributed to the FY 2025 guide.
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What to evaluate in a vulnerability-management process
When choosing or improving a process, compare its capabilities against the work the KEV queue requires. These are practical evaluation criteria derived from CISA’s description of discovery, scanning, analysis, testing, and remediation—not vendor-certified metrics.
| Criterion | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| Coverage | How complete and accurate are asset records and affected-version detection? |
| Freshness | How quickly are new KEV entries and scan signatures reflected in the workflow? |
| Workflow | Can the team assign owners and deadlines and track status through remediation? |
| Operational fit | Does the process support patch testing, maintenance windows, rollback planning, or interim mitigation? |
| Auditability | Can reviewers trace the finding match, prioritization decision, approval, and closure evidence? |
The aim is not to treat every KEV as an identical patch ticket. It is to make each listing trigger a timely, verifiable decision: confirm applicability, establish the relevant clock, assign responsibility, and track remediation or a documented blocker.
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